SO HOW does this Stein/Bock/Harnick musical look today, three-and-a-half decades after its initial triumph? And how does it sound in John Doyle’s production on the small square stage of the Watermill?

Well, the quality of that sound is very different from the lush treatment you will hear on the old cast recordings; more intimate, with only ten instruments, one for each member of the cast, who are actor-musicians. They are all on stage most of the time, playing an instrument if not singing, and when that instrument happens to be fiddle, piano or squeezebox and not flute or trumpet, managing both together.

Celebrating a troubled culture Charles Spencer in The Times reviews Fiddler on the Roof at the Watermill Theatre, Newbury

THIS is hardly a happy moment to be launching a revival of Fiddler on the Roof. With yesterday's paper dominated by pictures and eyewitness accounts of the death and devastation in Jenin, it is impossible to escape the unhappy thought that the Jews are now inflicting exactly the kind of suffering which they stoically endured themselves for centuries.

That suffering - along with a celebration of the culture and tradition of the small poverty-stricken Jewish villages of Tsarist Russia - forms the heart of this warm and humane musical, based on the stories of Sholem Aleichem.

Very interesting to know that their is a professional production going on as well at the moment. We too have found a lot more poignancy in the piece of late with the troubles in the middle east errupting so dramatically.<P>It is difficult putting a large scale show such as this into a small venue but we feel what we are lacking in scenery we make up in intimacy and the feeling of this being a very close knit community. In our venue we largely use photographic images projected onto a white cyc to give location.<P>We are having similar problems with the diturbance at the wedding - we do not have armies of Russians to come in and disturb us. We are hoping what we are doing is going to work.

I think with productions like Fiddler the book part of the show is extremely important therefore the dram of the piece takes on as miuch importance as the songs. Although designed originally for a lerge stage as all musicals were then I do think there are a lot of merits for staging it in a smaller venue.

<B>Fiddler on the Roof</B><BR>Reviewed by Roy Martin in The Stage<P><BR>It says a lot for John Doyle's staging of this musical that it seems a natural way of telling the story rather than a necessarily cut-down version of a Broadway show.<P>Instead of trying to get the whole village of Anatevka onto the Watermill stage he has deployed a couple of tables, milk churns and candles to focus on the domestic discontents at the heart of the tale.<P>And the score – resourcefully rearranged by Sarah Travis for Doyle's company of actor-musicians – comes across without any traces of ethnic quaintness.<P><A HREF="http://www.thestage.co.uk/paper/0216/0204.shtml" TARGET=_blank><B>click for more</B></A><BR>

Review in The Guardian.<P> <BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Well, blow me - you could knock me down with a feather. Yep, I know that this is a job where an open mind is a prerequisite, but if you told me that one day I'd be raving about a revival of the 1960s musical about a Jewish milkman living in Tsarist Russia, who finds his daughters have minds of their own when it comes to marriage, I'd have said that you were raving mad. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE><P><A HREF="http://www.guardian.co.uk/reviews/story/0,3604,687472,00.html" TARGET=_blank> <B> MORE </B> </A><P>What amazes me is the surprise there seems to be that this show can work so simply. To me that seems the best way to do it. It is not a glitzy show - what matters is an honesty in the relationships between the characters and in their beliefs.

Set at the turn of a century when political upheaval and revolution is about to change the world forever, the otherwise date-stamped musical premiered at the Grand prior to a UK tour has taken on a surprisingly contemporary feel.

To his credit, Paul Nicholas as Tevye makes no attempt to follow in the considerable footsteps of Topol, with whom the role will forever be identified. Instead, he makes the most of the humour and pathos of a man who opens singing of tradition and loses three liberated daughters to a crosssection of "modern" husbands.

As the tour progresses he will fit more snugly and less self-consciously into Tevye's shoes and project his own identity more confidently, even though he looks surprisingly chipper for a man with so many problems.

Fiddler on the Roof @ Palace Theatre By NATALIE ANGLESEY for Manchester online

ETHNIC cleansing, the birth of revolution and the death of the old traditions hardly seem the stuff of which musicals are made and yet they form the background for the award-winning musical, Fiddler On The Roof, which returns to the Palace Theatre after too long an absence.

Topol is, of course, the name everyone associates with this musical and Paul Nicholas is a brave man to take on a role so identified with the charismatic Jewish actor.

He makes a brave stab at playing Tevye, the Jewish dairyman who lives with his family in a small village in Czarist Russia.

The last time I saw Paul Nicholas onstage was in Singin' In The Rain, and he was no Gene Kelly. Now he's back in Fiddler On The Roof and he's no Topol either. Compact, dapper and unshakably gentile, Nicholas could never hope to match the effortless, genial gravitas of the Jewish actor who played the central role for well over two decades, and received an Oscar nomination for the 1971 film version.

For all that, Nicholas's portrayal of Tevye -- the milkman at the heart of a Jewish peasant community in early 20th century Russia -- is pretty hard not to like.

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